The Speckled Monster (42 page)

He brought the gavel down and announced a dinner recess. They would reconvene, he said glowering at Dr. Douglass, at four o'clock.

 

As he stepped into the street, Zabdiel plucked off his hot, scratchy wig and thrust it in a saddlebag. Without pausing to chat, he mounted his horse and rode north to Salutation Alley.

Cheever's house was on the left, on the southern side of the narrow lane. In the cauldron of summer, the coolest rooms were those downstairs, right at the front. Even so, it surprised him that Cheever answered the door himself. He must have been watching out for him. “Apparently,” said Zabdiel, “you're feeling better.”

“I'd be good as new if you hadn't blistered my back into tatters this morning,” said Cheever. His eyes betrayed him, though; his good cheer was nothing more than a thin, forced mask.

“Or you might still be broiling,” said Zabdiel. “Sit still, man, long enough for me to take your pulse. You're worse than a two-year-old.” The fever had entirely gone off; his pulse was normal. He drew his friend to the window to inspect his face: there were three or four flecks on his forehead.

“The eruption's begun,” said Cheever.

“It has,” nodded Boylston.

“How long before you'll know whether it's from the inoculation?”

Or from Sarah
. They both recognized that implication.

“A day or two,” said Zabdiel.

Cheever gave him a wan smile. “It's not me I'm worried about,” he said. His face pinched. “Come and see Sarah.”

In a darkened chamber upstairs, she lay moaning on the bed, her breath rasping in her throat. Her blisters had begun thickening into pustules two days ago, but still they were filling and spreading. If it went on much longer at this rate, thought Zabdiel, she would certainly flux in her face, and possibly over her body as well. Worse, he discovered that the sores in her nose and mouth had fluxed that morning, while he was stuck chattering in the Town House.

“I thought I could help,” said Cheever from the doorway. “But I can't touch her, I can't even breathe near her, without putting her in agony.” He stopped and looked away. When he started again, his voice was harsh and low. “When I come near her now, she shudders. When I drip water down her throat, she screams. But if I don't give her water, she'll die.
I can't help her, Zabdiel
.”

Zabdiel laid his hand on his friend's shoulders. “You're doing all any man can do,” he said quietly. “Far more than most would dare.”

It was all the comfort he could give.

At 4:00 P.M. sharp, Mr. Cooke called the meeting back to order and gave the floor once again to Dr. Douglass.

“This afternoon, gentlemen, I should like to begin by offering a case of conscience—merely as food for thought, since it is properly the purview of ministers. Smallpox, now, has been recognized for many thousands of years as a divine scourge, revealing the wrath of God Almighty and goading the wicked into repentance. Is it a Christian's endeavor to wrest that rod so lightly from the hand of Providence?”

Boylston studied Dr. Douglass for a moment. “May a Christian not employ new medicines, humbly giving thanks to God for his good Providence in revealing new discoveries to a miserable and suffering world? By your argument,” he said, “you condemn all of progress in medicine as unchristian.”

Behind his desk, Mr. Cooke sighed. “Let us set aside theology for the moment, until we might convene a more appropriate gathering of experts.”

Dr. Douglass did his best to keep his scowl to himself: would both Cooke and Clark undercut him all day? “My intent exactly,” he said, shifting directions. “Let us return to the subject of more worldly experience, on which Mr. Boylston has based much of his evidence. I now offer you the testimony of another man with firsthand knowledge of the operation.”

Some men had been drowsing, and two had frankly sunk into postprandial naps. Now heads swiveled; eyes snapped to attention.
Who else was messing with inoculation?

“Monsieur le docteur Laurence Dalhonde,
may I ask you to step forward?”

A coolly elegant man rose and made his way onto the floor in a gentle cloud of lavender. The heat had wilted many of the men in the room, staining their dark suits even darker with perspiration. But Dr. Dalhonde did not appear to have sweated so much as a drop.

“Dr. Dalhonde, how long have you been practicing medicine?”

“S'il vous plaît,”
he said with icy hauteur,
“je préfère parler le français.” If you don't mind, I prefer to speak French
. A refugee from the religious persecution in France, he kept close within the French community. He had never bothered to learn much English, which he regarded as a boorish language.

“Très bien,”
said Dr. Douglass smoothly. “I will translate.” Not for nothing had he spent those years studying in Paris, he thought. He repeated his question.

“I have been practicing for thirty years or thereabouts,” answered Dr. Dalhonde.

“Have you ever practiced inoculation?”

The doctor's look of horror needed no translation.
“Non,”
he replied with contempt.
“Jamais.”

In spite of himself, a small smile tickled the corners of Dr. Douglass's mouth. “When did you first encounter this infamous practice?”

“Twenty-five years ago,” said Dr. Dalhonde.

“That's not possible,” cried Boylston. “It had not—”

The room erupted into a buzz of chatter. Mr. Cooke rapped the desk his gavel.

Boylston took a step toward the selectman. “But—”

Mr. Cooke cut him off. “Dr. Boylston, you had your say this morning. You will have your say again later this afternoon. Just now, however, we wish to hear Dr. Dalhonde.”

Dr. Boylston made one more move to speak.

“Uninterrupted, if you please,” specified Mr. Cooke, waving him back to his place.

Boylston gave him a curt nod, and stepped back.

“Proceed,
s'il vous plaît,
” said Mr. Cooke.

With a smug bow, Dr. Douglass turned back to Dr. Dalhonde. “Perhaps, M. le Docteur, you could be so good as to describe those events.”

It was delightfully damning testimony. Not from an unknown Italian Papist whiling away the years among Turks. From a respected French Calvinist standing there, flesh and blood, in front of them.

Twenty-five years earlier, it transpired, Dr. Dalhonde had been with the French army in Italy, near Cremona, when this very operation had been attempted upon no fewer than thirteen soldiers. On three of them, said Dr. Dalhonde, the operation had had no effect, but on the other ten, the results had been horrible.

“And what, monsieur,” asked Dr. Douglass, “were these horrible results?”

“Death, sir. Death and destruction.”

Another buzz stirred the room; again, Mr. Cooke pounded it into submission.

“Four men died in agony. Another six barely recovered, troubled for life with swellings and tumors in the glands of the throat.”

“And was that your only experience with inoculation?”

“
Mais non
. I experienced it a second time twenty years ago.” That had been in Flanders, said Dr. Dalhonde, when the duc de Guiche had consigned a captain of the dragoons to his care. The man had been suffering terribly from the smallpox, truly terribly, covered not just with pocks, but with boils and ulcers. “He grasped my coat,” said Dr. Dalhonde, shaking his head at the memory, “and cried out piteously in these very words: ‘Ten years ago I was inoculated five or six times'—”

“That's impossible,”
Boylston burst out once more, loosing catcalls from the rim of the room.

“Silence,”
roared Mr. Cooke, rapping furiously with his gavel. “One further peep, Dr. Boylston, and you will be dismissed from this meeting. Is that clear?”

Boylston bowed, and Dr. Dalhonde picked up the thread of his story. “ ‘Ten years ago,' said this poor captain, ‘I was inoculated five or six times, but the cursed invention had no effect. Must I therefore perish? Can you do nothing for me?' ”

Revulsion chiseling his face, Dr. Dalhonde paused to glare at Boylston.

“Alas,” he continued, “I could not. The man survived: but some of the ulcers never left him. One of them, on his arm—just where he said he had endured this diabolical operation—lamed him for life.”

A sigh trailed through the room.

Dr. Dalhonde did not wait for Dr. Douglass's next prompt. “I had one final encounter with this diabolical procedure, only a few years afterward. In Spain, at the Battle of Almanza in 1707. Smallpox was eating through the army with such speed and strength that veteran soldiers who scorned to fear battle were quaking in their boots. At last, terror drove two Muscovites to dare this operation.

“One had no reaction at all. The other had a light smallpox and then recovered. Six weeks later, however, he was seized with a frenzy. His entire body swelled until he died. At first, they believed it was poisoning, so two of the personal physicians of the king of Spain, and a third who was in the entourage of His Royal Highness, le duc d'Orleans, opened the body. His lungs had ulcerated, which convinced them that it was no new poison, but the slow working of that previous infection.”

“Merci,
M. le Docteur,” said Dr. Douglass, through the muttering swirling around them.
“Merci beaucoup.”

Dr. Dalhonde bowed and retreated to his seat.

Dr. Douglass, meanwhile, fixed the company with the glare of a falcon. “Let us review the salient points of the doctor's eloquent testimony.

“Manifestly, inoculation maims and kills. Not always, you will notice, immediately, but sometimes as much as six weeks, or even years, later. Mr. Boylston has painted grand dreams of success, but all he can really tell you is that he has not killed anyone yet—though by his own admission, he has come close. His son and two slaves are alive a month later. But who can say where they will be in another month's time? In a year? Ten years?”

The company was silent; Boylston stared rigidly forward.

“And what profit is promised in return for this risk?” Dr. Douglass continued. “It is a shield, the inoculator has said, that may save extravagant thousands. But Dr. Dalhonde has given eyewitness testimony that it is not: one of his own patients who suffered the operation numerous times came to him deathly ill of the natural smallpox. By which we may conclude that it not only leaves one as vulnerable as a newborn, but considerably worse: covered with ulcers that rot limbs to the core.”

He paused for a breath, and Boylston jumped in. “If people had had their limbs rotting off, sir, or had been dying, or proved liable to smallpox after inoculation, I ask you—I ask you all—is it conceivable that this operation could have grown in popularity in such a great city as Constantinople for forty long years?

“Against this practice, you recount secondhand stories that make no sense with respect to the evidence given by no lesser body than the Royal Society. Let me make a counteroffer: In addition to the three patients you have heard about, who have already recovered, I have inoculated seven more persons, whose rashes have not yet come out.”

Gasps of outrage shivered through the room like arrows, but he ignored them till they fell away. “I invite all you to visit these inoculated patients as they progress through their illness.” Jeers and gibes tossed upward into the dome. Boylston glanced at Mr. Cooke, but he made no effort to quell the noise, so Boylston raised his voice to speak through it. “What makes this practice so valuable, in my opinion, is that it offers an escape from the violence, rage, and hazard of the disease taken in the natural way.”

Around him, the hooting died. “Before you condemn inoculation out of hand, compare for yourselves the experience of these patients with that of the many poor souls suffering smallpox in the natural way.”

“I cannot say I recommend such a course,” said Dr. Douglass from behind Boylston, “due to the danger of spreading infection.”

“How?” cried Boylston, spinning around in frustration.

Dr. Douglass smiled. “Let me explain: Dr. Dalhonde has testified that inoculation produces many kinds of sores, beyond pocks. It is not just the existence of such sores that must concern us, but their location, their nature, and their consequences.” He lowered his voice, so that men had to crane forward to hear him. “Some of the sores are not pocks, but swellings and tumors in the glands of the groin, armpits, and neck.”

He imagined his voice stretching long and razor sharp; he cooled it to ice to deliver the coup de grace. “The very places,” Douglass continued, “where one finds the sores of the black plague.”

A sigh, a little breath, came out came from all thirty men ringed around him at once. Fear shirred the air with a vision of streets stacked with flyblown corpses gnawed by starving dogs, of children turning their backs on parents and parents thrusting children from their doors. The smallpox, true, could kill whole villages and towns with equal virulence, especially in this new world, but smallpox was a disease they knew. The plague, in Boston, was unknown save in nightmares.

Not in France, though. Was it not devastating Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence?
And wasn't France the very place that Dr. Dalhonde had encountered inoculation? Were the two indeed connected?

Two clouds of death, one of yellow-white sores, the other purple-black, seemed to take shape and hover in the dome overhead; slowly, they began to stream and stretch toward one another, in a perfect, whirling storm of devastation.

Dr. Douglass kept his eyes on Boylston. With mounting glee, he watched him fit the steps of Dr. Douglass's masterful argument together. Watched him link this assault with the carefully laid trail of articles in the
Boston News-Letter
. Watched him move from the paper to its owner, editor, and chief writer, John Campbell, another Scot. Watched him surmise the sly ease with which Dr. Douglass had slipped such “news” into Campbell's insatiable maw during the half-drunken cheer of the Scots Charitable Society, meeting in an upper room at the Green Dragon.